That's really plausible, absolutely. When I posted, I almost said "hundreds, or even thousands" but didn't, and then afterward it occurred to me I was...
If I scan the room looking for my keys, I look at it one way; if I'm deciding where to set up Catan to play with my kids, I look at it another way. If...
Hmmmmm. Why can't I do all of that the other way round? Here's a shelf of books; here's shelf of CDs. When I'm looking for something to listen to, I "...
Better would be a two-place predicate, since "nothing" is an English quantifier, so the principle would be: ¬?x¬?y(x came from y) which is the same as...
I don't remember who said it, but there's also this: facts may very well be theory-laden, but we also want our theories to be fact-laden. (The sort of...
In fact, it seems more and more of our discussions around here are ending with this point: that if you have such and such purpose, you distinguish A f...
I can see doing this "at a certain level of abstraction" with a particular explanatory purpose in mind, but I'm not convinced that being able to do th...
That's basically it. One conceptual step that might help: If you have premises ¶ and want to derive the conclusion Q, then you want to show that the c...
Okay, I think I've got it. The "social" bit is easy, The hard bit is understanding what happens to agency, and to the distinction between organism and...
But then we still have the question of how to distinguish what is (real and) constructed from what is (real and) not constructed. I can't tell whether...
One issue as you noted is the problem of knowing what people really believe. But I agree with just about everything you said. I'd be okay with describ...
I think there is a widespread feeling, or even "prejudice", that nominalism, if not simply true, is at least the default position, and that any theory...
But maybe not. When Hume, he of the "is/ought gap" says "the wise man proportions his belief to the evidence," maybe we just take that as a fact, no i...
Sure, but I think rationality is normative in a non-moral sense. I don't think it's just a matter of expecting conformity, but there's "should" and "m...
Sometimes you'll hear economists talk about credit, and the economy at large, this way: that it is sustained by faith or trust, and if something under...
Oh yeah. In fact stealing and using or selling an identity is criminal as such, I assume. That's really interesting, how the system creates the opport...
What I'm wondering is this: if we analyze assertions to which we attach the additional normative claim -- "You should believe this" -- would that capt...
Maybe another way to say this is that the behavior of people is of course quite real, and some of their behavior can be described as participating in ...
Yes that's helpful. But it seems clear to me that the institution of property could conceivably wither away or be abolished or dramatically changed, n...
I would add: there's a difference between, say, fiction and human institutions. Telling a story doesn't make the story true. What is made, and what ha...
Gravity is found; human rights are fabricated. Both are quite real. When you make something, it's real, isn't it? The difference between gravity and h...
People don't consent to the social contract; it's an "as if" thing. On the other hand, I used to be fascinated how in old movies like The Postman Alwa...
It's really not obvious these three stand on their own. Plenty of people will reduce (2) to (1). You could reduce (3) to (2) or (1). Some might claim ...
Sure. I should've been clearer. I wasn't talking about including "whatever talk creates" in the social. I was thinking more of the role of engaged civ...
I think you're on the right track. I haven't read Frankfurt's book, but my sense of the bullshitter is that he is not just a subjectivist but indiffer...
I'm pretty sure LW thought all he had to do was show us how foolish we were being and we would quit it of our own accord. There would be no need for h...
That's really nice. Well said. Happily we also have this point: So if we believed race and the inherent inferiority of one race to another were part o...
I've been looking for a way to build a sort of "economic" model of truth within a population and I think I've gotten something I can use from the test...
Should also have mentioned Donald Barthelme. Maybe Robert Coover. I never read Gaddis. John Hawkes is the same era but it always seemed to me he had h...
See, this is the sort of thing that makes sense if you want to do literary history or cultural history as a science. From my point of view, reading Do...
Btw, have you read D. H. Lawrence's book about American literature? He describes Poe in terms that would strike the contemporary ear as "deconstructio...
You seem to have taken what I said as a claim to know for a fact that, for instance, Phil Dick is not a postmodernist writer, rather than an expressio...
I know I'm going to regret this, but ... That's a really strange list. DeLillo and Pynchon, sure. But not Dick, Faulkner, Gibson, McCarthy, or O'Conno...
Not poking fun at you. (That is a strange idiom.) Here's how this happened: to me, the schoolboy examples make it obvious that truth is not the same t...
I think we can use concepts of correctness or success without being forced to treat their appearance as an instance of truth, if that's what you were ...
Here's another wrinkle. How do the conspirators choose which answer they will give? A randomly chosen answer will pick up some support, but if it's qu...
In this case, it's having the answers you give on the test marked as correct. In our world, what's on the test is also submitted to scrutiny; there's ...
Sure, that's a point of view. I want to see what I can do without appealing to that at all, since people are always saying this view is fundamentally ...
Here, I can make this easier. Assume the great majority of students believe the test is being graded with a key, but a small number find out it isn't,...
That was part of the model but I left it out by mistake. It's no more complicated than the rest of this. And it naturally equates your level of certai...
I like the big showdown in Matrix 3, when Smith finds Neo's refusal to stay down irrational and when he asks him why he keeps getting up, Neo answers,...
The question is whether the Nietzschean creating his own values or the Sartrean choosing his own life project are recycling a model that needs somethi...
The hope was that something we'd be willing to call "truth" would show up. I think the hinge of the analysis I have so far is this: if your degree of ...
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